I have a pedestal fan which is rotating too fast. It's on the lowest setting yet it's stronger than the highest setting of any other fans I've seen. It's noisy as a drone, unnecessarily fast and i think it consumes more energy than it needs to.
Can I just use an adapter or something to reduce its input voltage so the motor rotates slower? Does it make sense? Would it harm the device?
Thanks,
Best Answer
Reducing the input voltage of a motor cooled by a fan (as your fan's motor is) can cause it to not get enough cooling, slowly cooking the insulation until you end up with an electrical fire. The fan was designed for a certain voltage, and it can be dangerous to run it on another voltage.
Also, unless you were to spend a lot of money for a Variable Frequency Drive, any adapter you would put between the fan and the wall would end up using the energy "saved" from running the fan at a lower voltage. In other words, if the fan was using 100 watts before, in order to reduce the fan power consumption to 80 watts, the "adapter", in the process of reducing the voltage, would use 20 watts.
I would recommend selling this fan and buying a new one that is not as noisy.